Greetings! I am Yasemin Simsek, a master’s candidate in American University’s Measurement and Evaluation program. The Quantitative Methods in Evaluation course required me to partner with an organization to identify a research need, collect and analyze data, and write a report. I had the incredible opportunity to work with the Neema Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering women experiencing poverty, gender-based violence, or teen pregnancy in Kitale, Kenya through services such as skills training, counseling, and faith-based support.

We are Laura Kim (Senior Consultant at the Canopy Lab) and Brooke Hill (Senior Program Manager at Social Impact). Laura is part of the team that works on Canopy’s Inclusion and Leadership series, which explores the forces that influence who gets to advance in international development and why. Brooke is the technical lead for the BRIDGE survey and co-leads the Equity Incubator, a lab studying equity and inclusion through data.

Hi, I’m Kim Norris, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) Director for American Institutes for Research (AIR)’s International Development Division. Part of my role is to lead a MEL practice. As part of our initial strategy, our practice team determined to focus on localizing our work. For us this means we seek out ways to increase local partnering and leadership in and around MEL efforts – from business development to MEL direction and execution. This involves local team leadership, capacity strengthening and engagement on local terms.

Our team is keenly aware that stories are best told by those who have lived them, and that we are at risk of losing the evaluation story without significant local engagement. We have learned how using the Most Significant Change method (MSC) can more actively involve local participants in identifying, analyzing and interpreting significant changes since program inception, and can help to uncover hidden and emergent aspects of an intervention’s relevance and effectiveness.

Hello! We are Isaac D. Castillo and Colleen Coyne, and we represent the Learning and Evaluation team at KABOOM!. And we have a question for you: What do playgrounds, data, systemic racism, maps, and evaluation all have in common? Playgrounds should serve as a sanctuary for children – an escape from everyday pressures where they can just be kids. But not every child in the United States has access to a safe and high-quality playground. At KABOOM!, we refer to these disparities in access and quality as playspace inequity. KABOOM! builds playgrounds in partnership with others across the United States to end playspace inequity, so more kids can grow up happy and healthy. But how do we measure playspace inequity? That is where data, maps, storytelling, and evaluation come in.

We are the Student Evaluation Case Competition Working Group (Dana Linnell, Steve Mumford, Carolina De La Rosa Mateo, Julian Nyamupachitu, Rana Gautam, Jennifer Yessis, Christine Roseveare, and Asma Ali). We’re excited to tell you about the inaugural competition!

Janelle, JoAnna, Mary, and Christiana here, evaluators from Emory Centers for Public Health Training and Technical Assistance. We had the opportunity to present a session entitled No More Crappy Surveys at last year’s AEA Summer Evaluation Institute. We are on a mission to rid the world of crappy surveys, and are here to share some of our Hot Tips and Rad Resources to do so.

If you haven’t already, check out the first blog post in this series, No More Crappy Surveys – Best Practices in Survey Design for Evaluations (you can check it out here). Today, we’ll be following up with some tips on how to analyze your surveys (which, of course, you’ve made sure are not crappy!). Stay tuned for our final post of this series, on how to report your findings to different audiences.

Hello AEA friends –

This is Corrie Whitmore, the 2023 President of AEA. I’m thrilled to be in Indianapolis for EVAL2023: The Power of Story and hope to see many of you here, attending workshops and conference sessions and enjoying the great local attractions.

Our conference week kicks off on October 9, which is also “Indigenous People’s Day.” Indigenous People’s Day is special to me, because I’m the mother of Indigenous children, and also because it offers such a clear example of The Power of Story. Let me explain.

We are Linda Khumalo and Gert Van Hecken. We collaborate on a project to reimagine M&E from a decolonial perspective. Here we share some lessons learned. Linda is an evaluation practitioner and scholar contributing to the Made in Africa Evaluation (MAE) discourse who sees the challenges of applying a transformative evaluative lens. Gert is an …

Decolonization in Evaluation Week: Knowledge asymmetries and struggles for space: Towards a decolonial turn in the evaluation of ‘development’ and ‘conservation’ programmes by Linda Khumalo & Gert Van Hecken Read More »

Hi there! I’m Katie Boone, PhD student in Organizational Leadership Policy Development – Evaluation Studies at the University of Minnesota. From our Guiding Principles, Evaluator Competencies, and Statement on Cultural Competence, context has a crucial role in evaluation practice. One of the greatest blindspots I see in the field of evaluation, is our consciousness to …

Decolonization in Evaluation Week: Finding Place: Grounding Evaluation by Decolonizing Context by Katie Boone Read More »